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The smallest dinosaur could reach speeds of about 60 kilometres per hour and even the lumbering Tyrannosaurus rex would have been able to outrun most modern sportsmen, according to new research.

Scientists using computer models calculated the top speeds for five meat-eating dinosaurs in a study they say can also illustrate how animals cope with climate change and extinction.

The velociraptor, whose speed and ferocity was highlighted in the film Jurassic Park, reached about 40 kilometres per hour, according to the study published in the Royal Society journal Biological Sciences.

And T-rex could muster speeds of up to 30 kilometres per hour.

"Our research, which used the minimum leg-muscle mass T-rex required for movement, suggests that while not incredibly fast, this carnivore was certainly capable of running and would have little difficulty in chasing down footballer David Beckham, for instance," says author Dr Phil Manning, a palaeontologist at the University of Manchester.

The smallest dinosaur, the Compsognathus, could run about 60 kilometres per hour, about 8 kilometres per hour faster than the computer's estimate for the fastest living animal on two legs, the ostrich.

A top human sprinter can reach a speed of about 40 kilometres per hour.

Computer model

The researchers used a computer model to calculate the running speeds of five dinosaurs that varied in size from the 3 kilogram Compsognathus to a 6 tonne T-rex.

They fed information about the skeletal and muscular structure of the dinosaurs into the computer and ran a simulation tens of millions of times to see how fast the animals moved, says Dr William Sellers, a zoologist at the University of Manchester, who led the study.

They checked their method by inputting data of a 70 kilogram human with the muscle and bone structure of a professional sportsman and found the computer accurately spat out a top running speed just behind T-rex's pace.

"People have estimated speeds before but they have always been indirect estimates and hard to verify," Sellers says. "What we found is they were all perfectly capable of running."

Life and death

Looking at how these ancient animals lived and died out is also important in trying to predict how modern species may cope with future climate change, Sellers adds.

This study helps to build a biological picture that scientists can use to better understand how dinosaurs adapted to changes in the weather just before they went extinct some 65 million years ago, he says.

"Knowing how these animals coped over the past millions of years will give us clues to what is going to happen over the next thousand years," he says. "That is why there has been more recent interest in biology of these animals."